It is common for website to be down for a few hours for maintenance. And Twitter is no exceptions. But when an important site like twitter is going to be down for a few hours, lots of things needs to be taken into considerations.

Usually, the downtime will be at those wee hours so that not many users are affected. (And also torture the technical guy) But for a site that has users all over the world, there isn’t a thing call wee hours. Wee hour at one part of the world can be peak hour at another part of the world. So usually they will either take the wee hour of the part of the world where the site is created or wee hour for most users. But not this case for Twitter.

In a very interesting move, Twitter and their webhost NTT America Enterprise Hosting Services (Not related to our NTT) decides to reschedule the downtime to 2pm PST. That means it would be 2pm in San Francisco, 5pm in New York and 10pm in London. Not an issue for Singapore since it would be 5am here. Its an interesting move since most countries are still awake when the server is down for maintenance.

The reason is very simple. Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran due to the elections. The 2pm PST downtime is chosen because it will be 1am in Iran. (assuming that there won’t be much breaking news at 1am.)

Good move Twitter and NTT America.

Update: It was the US State Department that requested Twitter to postpone the server maintenance. Thanks to Tony for informing me about this.

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2. Singnet Maintenance Schedule
3. Twitter – turning off sms alert for rest of the world
4. Connecting to Twitter
5. Bye bye dreamhost. Hello Gatorhost